Month: May 2014

When was the last time that you were silent? I mean really, really silent. Silent enough to hear the different types of bird song outside your window. Silent enough to concentrate on a deep inhale and exhale of your breath. Silent enough to hear the deepest meditations of your heart. For many of us, silence is a rare commodity amidst the whirring and buzzing of text messages, phone calls, and social media begging for our attention. The only moments of silence we might get on a work break or even during our commute we fill with music, tweets, and the most up to date news postings. In essence, we almost never give our mind and hearts a time to just be present, be calm, and be quiet.

Jewish text bored me growing up. It seemed finite, immovable, treacherously antiquated and completely incompatible with my Reform Judaism. Its “living”characteristic eluded me, and its text was too verbose to swallow. I preferred to discard text instead of struggling with it. I followed Jewish traditions according to my father’s practice or according to a blurb on the Internet. My adolescent understanding of Judaism was as a guide to living morally; but the texts, particularly those outside of the Tanakh, seemed completely stale to my underdeveloped Jewish palate.

Shortly before Yom ha-Shoah 5774, I found myself faced with the task of explaining the unexplainable: teaching the students of my pulpit’s religious school about the Holocaust. How could I teach young children, five to eleven years of age, anything meaningful about the Holocaust? What could I say to make the events seem real to them, without diminishing their hope that they themselves would go on to live long, happy lives? As I looked at them, thinking how best to choose my words, I could not help thinking of young Edith, the girl I never met, the girl who saw her own father shot by Nazi soldiers. I thought of the girl who became a strong woman, who survived to live a long life with its own ups and downs.